Christopher Nolan Finally Speaks On The Ambiguous Ending Of 'Inception'

For me, there are three questions that will remain unanswered for the foreseeable future – Where did life come from on this planet? Are there aliens? And what happened at the end of the movie ‘Inception’ (Was it a dream or reality? The Totem did wobble, didn’t it?). Well, at least, the answer to the last question has been finally answered.

On 1st June, 2015, the commencement ceremony at the prestigious Princeton University saw director Christopher Nolan speaking to young minds about the important things in life, and somewhere in his speech he gave away the explanation of the movie ‘Inception’. According to a report by Hollywood Reporter, he said:

"In the great tradition of these speeches, generally someone says something along the lines of 'Chase your dreams,' but I don't want to tell you that because I don't believe that," he told the students at Class Day.

"I want you to chase your reality. I feel that over time, we started to view reality as the poor cousin to our dreams, in a sense. ... I want to make the case to you that our dreams, our virtual realities, these abstractions that we enjoy and surround ourselves with — they are subsets of reality."

He apologized to anyone who hadn't seen ‘Inception’. To be honest, he shouldn’t have, as not having seen such a brilliant movie is no less than a crime.

He went on by saying:

"The way the end of that film worked, Leonardo DiCaprio's character Cobb — he was off with his kids, he was in his own subjective reality. He didn't really care anymore, and that makes a statement: perhaps, all levels of reality are valid. The camera moves over the spinning top just before it appears to be wobbling, it was cut to black."

"I skip out of the back of the theater before people catch me, and there's a very, very strong reaction from the audience: usually a bit of a groan," he joked.

"The point is, objectively, it matters to the audience in absolute terms: even though when I'm watching, it's fiction, a sort of virtual reality. But the question of whether that's a dream or whether it's real is the question I've been asked most about any of the films I've made. It matters to people because that's the point about reality. Reality matters."

Not the perfect answer as one would hope for but Nolan answered in his rational style of filmmaking – honest, ambiguous, yet fulfilling.

Catch another glimpse of the ending of the most gripping movie of the 21st century.